Searching the Past to Understand the Future

01/29/2013

I’ve had a The Single Life and/or a ZOMG! Teh Menz post a-brewin’ for a while. The problem is that it’s entirely based on me responding to articles, several of which I read about a month ago. So it’s all getting a bit jumbled about in my head. That’s fun, though, right?

What’s going to end up happening here, though, is I’m just going to put up a bunch of links.

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People love writing about online dating. I’m no different, I suppose. I’ve written a bunch of posts about online dating. I haven’t written any lately, though, mostly because my ability to care about the whole thing is rather limited at the moment. Still, I’m always interested when other people write about it online dating. Mostly because about half of the articles end up being hilariously wrong or misguided.

See, Ludlow’s article was all about how online dating has commoditized dating. I actually wrote about thatexact same thing many, many months ago. One of the big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where there are too many choices. One of the other big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where several of the available choices are pie-in-the-sky fantasy, at best. Too many pie-in-the-sky fantasy choices could be the name of the next big online dating site.

I would never make a claim, however, that online dating destroys commitment, either in theory or in practice. I think I was pretty clear in my own musings about online dating that I was going in with incorrect attitudes and presuppositions and that I was pretty damaged. All online dating does is allow damaged people to meet other damaged people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and spread the misery farther and faster.

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I read the Dan Slater article next, pretty much in the spirit of an anecdote that Ludlow then jumped off of with a sort of detached journalism. As such, I didn’t immediately notice that there were…shall we say, problems with the Slater article.

Last week, Dan Slater at the Atlantic wrote what may be the worst piece on online dating I’ve ever read, which is a truly remarkable feat in such a competitive field. Slater’s theory is that because online dating sites are a magical wonderland where men can meet and fuck an endless array of women, it means men will have no desire to get married and thus will be the ruin of marriage. If I were married to Dan Slater, I would get a lawyer on retainer now, because there’s projection all over this thing. And let’s be clear: Slater means men. He claims “people”, but as Alexis Madrigal (who, if you’re rushing to disagree with him, I should point out is male, so you might want to slow your roll, trolls) points out in the same publication, Slater didn’t bother to interview any women, much less any men that have a different experience from his buddy Jacob.

This is the second paragraph from Alexis’s article:

Narratively, the story focuses on Jacob, an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship. The problem, however, is not him, and his desire for a "low-maintenance" woman who is hot, young, interested in him, and doesn't mind that he is callow and doesn't care very much about her. No, the problem is online dating, which has shown Jacob that he can have a steady stream of mediocre dates, some of whom will have sex with him.

That pretty much sums up Dan Slater’s article in a nutshell.

One of the real big problems with anyone who writes an article about online dating that’s primarily from one person’s perspective is that that one person might be wrong about a lot of things. I include myself in this. I don’t offer myself as a paragon of people who have experienced online dating, since I freely admit that I was kind of being a major asshole a lot of the time. Yeah, I might have just met some crazy people, but I probably didn’t do a damn thing to help myself, either.

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So yesterday Amanda Marcotte offered up the diametric opposite of the “guy who just wants to get laid” article with the “woman who desperately wants to get married” article. Those are also fun. Amanda offered her thoughts as a counterpoint to Jill over at Feministe and, for the record, I can’t be arsed to read the original article, since I really don’t care. What I want to highlight is something Amanda points out that is a fascinating underlying assumption of all of these sorts of articles:

Now, I’m not married and don’t want to be, in no small part because the institutional nature of marriage leads directly to this kind of thinking, wherein “spouse” is a job you want filled instead of an outgrowth of your love for another person. But there’s definite ideological argument of gender underpinning these stereotypes of why women and men marry. Basically, the implication is that real love between men and women is a myth. This fits into a larger sexist belief that men and women are “opposites” who put up with each other out of necessity, but who don’t really like each other very much. Believers in this believe that women need men, who are their social superiors, to choose them and validate them. (Being unchosen is considered a fate worse than death, which is why so many conservatives think that it’s a game winner to “argue” that feminists are just unchosen women who are bitter about our lack of validation from men—validation that is our sole purpose in existing, apparently.) In exchange for validating a woman’s right to exist by choosing her, a man gets someone to look after him and his home, provide him regular sex, and have children that will be named after him.

A while back I went on several dates with a woman. She was intelligent and accomplished. She also seemed to be quite well prepared for the whole settling down thing and decided that I was the one to do that.

My problem there was pretty simple: I just wasn’t that into her. I tried to convince myself to change my mind, but I couldn’t[1] bring myself to that. One of the interesting things about the way my mind works is that I draw pretty quick and accurate conclusions and then I spend about six months ignoring those conclusions until everything shakes out.

So what happened was I walked away from the first date, which went pretty well, all things considered, with Sons of Bill’s “So Much for the Blues”[2] running through my head. I then proceeded to not really think about her much and act like kind of a dick the next time I saw her. In spite of that, though, she kept trying. It eventually hit the point where every interaction we had came down to a conversation about how we couldn’t get along.

It was pretty much awful.

This particular story is a bit different from the “women planning their weddings even though they’re single and will probably be single for a long-ass time” thing in that I don’t know that she was planning to plug me into a five-year plan in a marriage binder filled with clippings from Modern Bride or whatever. I bring it up, though, because it’s pretty obvious she had a plan, she decided that I was the ideal person to fill in that part of the plan, and she didn’t notice that I was very much not on board. Then, even though I pretty much played the role of major dickhead, she still tried to get me to play that role.

I think this is the danger of seeing relationships as a job and the potential job applicants as being interchangeable. You ignore the person in front of you for the person who is in your head filling the role you think they should fill. It’s a good way to get yourself hurt and end up developing extremely negative opinions of your fellow humans.

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[1]Protip: don’t do that. Seriously, if something isn’t right, even if you can’t figure out why, just go with that. Life is easier that way.

[2]For those who don’t know, it’s basically a song about a guy breaking up with a girl and not giving a shit. Because he’s a total dick. And now he’s going to write a song about it, because breaking someone’s heart to write a song is a worthwhile trade. It also includes some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Yeah I wish I could write a song like Townes Van ZandtThen I could be a son of a bitch and no one would give a damnAnd I just keep telling myself that no one understands

01/28/2013

I was reading The Communist Manifesto the other day, you know, as you do. It occurred to me that Karl Marx’s historical reading of the nature of economics was spot on. It also occurred to me that his conclusions of what had to happen as a result were somewhat less than spot on. That should surprise no one, though. We’re living on the back-end of the downfall of Communism as an actual, viable form of human governance, after all.

Still, there are parts of The Communist Manifesto that could have come from John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405. That’s why we’re here to talk about my reading habits. I was actually going to play a game where I quoted Marx and claimed that it was from Darwin and then said, “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you.” But Marx used the word “bourgeoisie” nearly as often as Darwin uses extraneous commas, so I decided against it. Also, he spoke of economic trends in the present tense, which would be a dead giveaway, at least for the five people who seem to frequent this blog and aren’t looking for evidence that Coldplay sucks. So let’s do this in a more standardized way.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

That, quite literally, could have come directly from the pages of Darwin’s book. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look.

By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America. The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partially the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia. One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.[1]

Darwin points out that the world market was a result of globalization. Marx points out that the world market is a bad thing due to the fact that it’s a product of people who intend to profit from the market costs. Neither Marx nor Darwin was wrong.

That’s the funny thing about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/whatever you want to call it. The base assumptions made by Karl Marx weren’t wrong. We’ve spent the last century in a conflict between Communism and capitalism based on the conclusions drawn by those conclusions, though. There’s been a great deal of wrong drawn in that space. The reason for that wrong was simple: part of the wrong was based on Marx’s own conclusion. Part of the wrong was based on the lack of willingness on the part of the free market capitalists to acknowledge any path to economic security other than their own. Part of the wrong was based on a belief that there is a binary response to the human condition.

In the next post I shall discuss how there isn’t a binary response to this conflict between Communism and capitalism. I shall also discuss how, at least in the context of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we’ve given up allowing that conversation.

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[1] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 330.

For those who don’t remember, I’m actuallythree postsinto making fun of Gavin Menzies and his spectacularly historically inaccurate notion that the Chinese sent a giant, secret fleet to Italy in 1434 and kicked off the Italian Renaissance. So far I’ve managed to write three posts that take up about twelve pages in order to deconstruct something less than two pages of 1434. I’m doing this because there’s an important lesson: history is hard. One idiotic and incorrect claim often requires one hundred facts to set straight. As such, it’s usually easier to just say, “Eh, that guy’s a crank,” and leave it at that.”

For those of us who love history, though, having that opportunity to research and compile and instruct can be its own reward. I have a fascination with the Age of Discovery and the early Renaissance and how Europeans changed the way they saw and thought of the world. Taking on Gavin Menzies, then, is an opportunity both for snark and to do something I’d enjoy doing, anyway. So it’s a win-win. It’s also a really, really, long slog. So let’s begin.

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but I have a real problem with the way history is generally taught. We usually learn history as either a series of dates and names that have no connection or as a master narrative that makes it seems like Event A inexorably lead to Event B and then Event C was the only logical response. Or, worse, we make it seem like Person A saw Event A and Event B and then went and intentionally caused Event C in order to get Outcome Z. This is, for the most part, flat wrong.

We think about history in this manner because we see the historical narrative. Certain people, places, and things are connected so we invoke a narrative to explain why they’re connected that often starts with the outcome or at least its place in history. That narrative is wrong as often as not, but we keep telling it to ourselves because humans are addicted not to the facts but to the narrative that puts them all together. That narrative is where conspiracy theories are born. That narrative is why conspiracy theories often fall apart when you pick at the details.

If you go back to part 3 of the 1434 posts you’ll see that Menzies went after Martin Waldseemuller and Johannes Schoner and attempted to use their maps as proof that they’d learned about the world from Chinese maps. Debunking that notion required a quick primer on pretty much every European map of the new world that existed at the time. Feel free to refresh your memory, because things are about to get even more complicated.

These two rustic mapmakers were not the only Europeans with an uncanny prescience about unseen lands. In 1419, before European voyages of exploration even began, Albertin di Virga published a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that shows northern Australia. It was another 350 years before Captain Cook “discovered” that continent.

So…this is super awkward. See, a bit of Google-fu brought me to a page on Gavin Menzies’ own site that included a description of the 1419 di Virga map and a comparison to the “1418” Liu Gang map which I shall get into shortly. Here’s the link. Notice anything about the di Virga map on Menzies’ own website? If you said, “There’s nothing that looks even remotely like Australia on that map,” you’d be correct. It’s interesting, too, since there was another, slightly different depiction of the di Virga map on Wikipedia that did actually show a landmass off to the east of the Eurasian continent. You could make a case that the land out there is Australia, I suppose, but all the descriptions I’ve seen indicate that the inscription says “Caparu sive Java magna.” It’s far more likely that di Virga simply penciled in a landmass to cover Java, which Marco Polo did visit, and possibly that other Pacific island that so beguiled the medieval European imagination: Cipangu, or Japan.

I should pause here and point something out. The possibility that Chinese cartography influenced European cartography cannot and, for that matter, should not be dismissed. The di Virga map is, in fact, a key place where it’s important to take a moment’s pause, as is the Martellus map I mentioned in part 2. The reason it’s important to consider the possibility of Chinese influence is the Kangnido map I mentioned in part 3 as compared to the old Ptolemy map and the legacy of the Dragon’s Tail. Europeans in the early part of the Renaissance thought that the Indian Ocean was landlocked. Not all maps made in the early 1400s showed this, however, which was interesting considering that no European rounded the Cape of Good Hope before the very late 1400s and Vasco de Gama was the first European to sail from western Europe to India in a voyage that ran more-or-less concurrently with Columbus’s expeditions to the New World.

Toby Lester offers as good an explanation as we’ll probably get in The Fourth Part of the World:

During the early 1400s a few maps appeared in Europe that also suggested an awareness of Africa’s true shape. A case in point is the world map of Albertin de Virga, made in Venice between 1411 and 1415. Drawn before the Portuguese had even captured Ceuta[1], and probably incorporating knowledge obtained from Muslim or Chinese merchants, the map confidently portrays the continent as bulging out to the west in the north, and then honing itself gently to a point in the South.[2]

It stands to reason that Muslim cartographers would have some idea of what Africa looked like by the early 1400s. That explanation is more likely than a Chinese-centered cartography, though. Still, there was enough sharing of information between Europe, the Middle East, and China to make any explanation of mapmaking that doesn’t include some amount of sharing far more suspect than one that does. For one, accounts of Marco Polo’s sojourn in the east had been available for nearly a century by then. The Fra Mauro mappamundi was, for example, said to be based in part on a map brought back from Cathay by Polo himself.

The key thing to realize here, though, is that if Gavin Menzies had simply claimed that the Chinese knew more than the Europeans of the 1400s about the navigation of the Indian Ocean the appropriate response would probably be something like, “Well, duh.” European maps from before 1300 or so weren’t exactly based on anything closely resembling reality and the ones up until about 1600 still had some weirdness. Hell, they were still bugging anyone and everyone from Africa or Asia about the Prester John fellow until sometime around 1500 and Gog and Magog were hanging out in Siberia for most of that time, too.

When confronted with an aberration on a European map it’s actually best to work under the assumption that the cartographer was either incorrect, making a wild guess, or treating legendary lands as real places. This, though, is where the narrative and the conspiracy theories come into play. We know now that the Americas exist and where they are. We know now that Australia and Antarctica exist and where they are. Any map that contains things that look like the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica before their official discoveries, then, invite speculation.

So let’s get back to the di Virga map and the Liu Gang map that Gavin Menzies compared it to. The Liu Gang map is supposedly a 1763 copy[3] of a 1418 map. So Menzies calls the di Virga map a 1419 map and claims he copied it from the Liu Gang map after di Virga ran into the Chinese somewhere. The problem here is that there is no full date on the di Virga map, just the numbers 141. Every other source I’ve seen reads the map as created in either 1411 or 1415. So that’s a pretty strong mark against Menzies’ interpretation.

This is how conspiracies work, though. There are two things, one of which is a map that is most likely a forgery. Then there’s another map that’s most likely not a forgery but that seems to match up with the forged map and also has anachronisms and a fuzzy date. So Menzies took the most generous possible interpretation of the fuzziness of the date and turned it into proof of his own theory.

I have, however, run a marathon where a brisk walk down the block would have been enough. Remember: Gavin Menzies’ theory is that the Chinese discovered the New World in 1421. His book, which has a copyright of 2002, makes absolutely no mention of Liu Gang, which you’d think it would since, y’know, it would be slam-dunk evidence. That’s because Liu Gang didn’t reveal his map until 2005 or 2006. Whether Liu Gang is in on the hoax is debatable, but for the sake of argument let’s say his story is correct and that he’s been suckered by a fake map.

Liu Gang’s map supposedly dates to a 1418 map created by Zheng He that shows the entire world pretty much as we know it today. Gavin Menzies originally claimed that Zheng He discovered the New World on a voyage that lasted from 1421 through 1423. So who gave Zheng He his 1418 map before his 1421 voyage? Was it St. Brendan?

[1]A Muslim fortification on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar from, well, Gibraltar. The Portuguese captured it in 1415 as part of the long struggle between the Christians of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslims of North Africa. It’s currently a semi-autonomous Spanish possession because of things that are totally outside the scope of this project. The Portuguese push to explore along the coast of Africa didn’t start until well after Ceuta.

[2] ] Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name, (New York: Free Press, 2009), 207.

[3]Purchased by a man named Liu Gang. Liu Gang claims that it’s a copy of a 1418 map created by Zheng He as part of his voyages. I choose to call it the Liu Gang map, though, since that’s easier and calling it the Zheng He map wouldn’t be accurate.

01/24/2013

The difference between a good history course and a bad history course is simple. In the good history courses students learn how to take disparate bits of information, pull them together, and come to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the world. In the bad history courses students simply learn names, dates, and places with no connection. In the truly terrible history courses students learn names, dates, and places with an ideological bent to convince them to buy into an ideology or patently false interpretation of reality.

This, for the record, is why you hear Evangelical Christians spout off about liberal schools indoctrinating children. Evangelical Christians of the sort who worry about evil liberals and their agendas usually do so because they have an agenda themselves and can’t see anything outside of the framework of competing ideologies and force-fed interpretations of reality. The idea of a good education and well-rounded students is an ideology, in that it is an ideology of instruction. A good education producing well-rounded students does not and should not be an ideology of interpretation, however. The simple fact is, though, that a well-rounded and knowledgeable student will most likely not take the blinkered reality of the zealot, which makes it appear to that blinkered zealot that there is a nefarious goal in mind.

This interplay of notions of how reality works is what drew me to the particular bits of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 that occasioned these posts. It is, in fact, a tale of convergence.

In the latter third of the book I hit a section called “Global Economics” that focused mostly on the British Empire and its system in the late 1800s, since that was the height of the empire upon which the Sun never set. British thinking about money and globalization, then, dominated much of the world’s thinking about money and globalization. All of that came together to produce this remarkable passage:

London’s size and wealth thus grew in sympathy with the surging growth of international trade. Among its merchants and bankers,[1] it was an article of faith that what was good for London was good for the world. The idea of free trade and the open economy was adopted in Britain in the 1840s and ‘50s not just as a policy but as a total world-view, an ideology promoted with crusading passion. It imagined a world in which peoples would be freed from their bondage to rulers by the flood tide of commerce. Individual freedom and international trade would move forward together. Free trade was regarded as the key to British economic success, and to the economic progress of the rest of the world. (The alternative – protection – was rejected politically in Britain before 1914, and its supporters were divided over what to protect.) Its champions insisted that letting the market decided on what it made sense to produce was the most efficient way to use economic resources.[2]

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this recently, possibly in a contemporary and immediate context. The fascinating thing about the bit that I quoted above is that it is still an economic stand made by proponents of free market capitalism and libertarianism today. It’s also fascinating in the way that it’s an ideology that eats its own tail.

We think now of free market capitalism and the freedom that it entails in the minds of its supporters as the downside of the legacy of the Cold War. As such, we think of it, discuss it, and argue about I in the context of that great ideological conflict of the 20th Century: the fight between capitalism and Communism. However, if you put Darwin’s passage above in the proper historical context something leaps out immediately. Britain adopted free market economics in the 1840s and ‘50s and it became at fully entrenched, unassailable position over the next thirty years.

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. He wrote Das Kapital two decades later. Marxism, then, arose as a counterpoint to the increasingly entrenched capitalistic free market system. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, especially if you follow me through my two points of convergence. I’d already realized we seem to be repeating history in a disturbingly similar way. What threw me off was the way other people are seeing the same thing but from different perspectives.

The day after I read the bit about economics Fred Clark put up a post about Christianity Today’s objections to employee health care and compared it to the old Gilded Age notion of the company town. Fred’s purposes for discussing the company town were different than John Darwin’s reasons for discussing British adherence to free market capitalism and my reasons to start thinking about Marxism and Communism but they all pointed in exactly the same direction. The system only works if the people at the very top who control the conversation do so while exploiting the people at the bottom and not allowing them to point it out.

The latter half of the paragraph from After Tamerlane should, hopefully, draw the conclusion completely together.

Countries without capital or an industrial base should concentrate their efforts on the production of “staples”: the raw materials or foodstuffs for which a world demand existed. They should use the income that their staples earned to buy the manufactures they needed, and to pay back the interest on the capital they borrowed – since staple production could expand only if there were railways and harbours to bring the goods to market. Any other policy – for example building up industrial production behind a wall of tariffs – was not only inefficient (because industrial goods could be bought more cheaply abroad), it was also unjust. It meant that the consumer was taxed in favour of those who had gained the production of tariffs, a political process that (so free-traders implied) was invariably corrupt. Enlightened colonial rule should thus enforce free trade (as the British did in India), just as wise diplomacy should always encourage it.[3]

Consider the implications of the free market system as envisioned by 19th Century British capitalists. Those “staples” were raw materials. In some cases it was things like food or tea. In most cases, though, it was things like cotton and silk that would then be sent elsewhere and then turned into textiles and sold back to the producers of the raw materials.

For the British this made perfect sense. They had all the factories, after all, and manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials and generally have a higher profit margin. Part of the reason that manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials, it’s important to note, is that manufactured goods include raw materials. So the British were buying materials from their undeveloped colonies at price X and selling them back at price X + Y. Moreover, they were also engaging in infrastructure improvements – mostly the building of railroads – that worked to their benefit. Infrastructure improvements allowed the colonizers to move raw materials to port and bring manufactured goods back to the producers of the raw materials and also allowed them to quickly move troops around so a smaller number of British forces could be used to hold a larger area than if large, permanent garrisons were necessary. All of this, then, could be billed to the colonized people under the guise of paying their rightful share for all of the civilization the British had gifted to them.

It should be blatantly obvious that the things the British were paying for in this system were far lower in price than the things they were getting paid for in return. This doesn’t make any economic sense until you realize that the world’s primary source of capital at the time was London. The Brits were more than happy to make loans to cover the difference at a reasonable interest rate.

The goal of British free market capitalists, in short, was to turn the entire world into a company store.

This was an untenable situation. The British proponents of free market capitalism didn’t see it that way, but they were the isolated ones at the top. They could afford to sit around in their splendid isolation and discuss how the economic situation that was best for them was also best for everyone else.

It wasn’t, for the record. That’s why Marxism and then Communism began to gain traction at the same time. It’s important to note, though, that Marxism was initially supposed to be a workers’ revolt in the already industrialized world. It wasn’t until Trotsky and the Comintern that Communism took on the agricultural workers’ revolt that we think of today in places like Vietnam and Central America. As such, it’s useful to consider another link that I ran across that very afternoon.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal put a link up to a Foreign Policy article with the snarky description, “Charles Emmerson makes case at Foreign Policy that world in 2013 eerily similar to world in 1913. True, the Czar and the Kaiser have been restless of late, and the Entente is irresolute.”

Emmerson offers this great summation of what I was thinking at the time: “In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?”

Yes. Yes it can. And we’ve got a ways to go.

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[1]One thing that did annoy the fuck out of me whilst re-reading the book was the apparent lack of the services of a good copy editor. Darwin apparently has some sort of written Tourettes that compels him to splatter commas all over the place. That might be a British thing, I suppose, but I’ve read a few British historians in my day and don’t remember seeing that many egregious commas. John Julius Norwich, for one, seemed to know where to put his commas. Each page also seemed to have at least one or two minor but obvious grammatical errors or missing words or something similar. It gave me a sad.

[2] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 335.

01/23/2013

Today is January 23rd. That means that yesterday was January 22nd, which is a very special day indeed. On January 22nd, 2011 I brought Daisy home.

When I got her she was probably close to a year old by the calculations of the folks who rescued her, so I arbitrarily declared the 22nd of January her birthday as well. By my calculations she's now lived in six places in her three years on this planet: with the people who originally mistreated her, with the lady who rescued her, with my friends who fostered her, with me in Texas, with me at my parents' house, and now with me in my house.

She's a well traveled and flexible pup, that one.

Anyway, since Chicago is really friggin' cold right now, her third birthday was more a day for quiet contemplation.

That grey toy to her right, for the record, is Teri the Triceratops, which my sister got for her for Christmas. It's the greatest dog toy ever. Seriously.

You also might be thinking, "Wait, did he bring his carpet from Texas with him? Because the carpet in that first picture looks a lot like the carpet in the second." They're very similar in color, mostly because I realized that Daisy's hair blended pretty well with my carpet in Texas. I can assure you, though, that my current carpet is much nicer than the Texas carpet. The stuff down there was relatively cheap rental-grade carpet. I gots myself some nice, plush Mohawk for my house.

After her difficult day of napping and getting a special birthday treat and hanging out with my parents' dog for a couple hours Daisy took a well-deserved nap in the a safe, camouflaged location.

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful. This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe. So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory. Well, there are two. The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history. The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory. John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs. This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation. Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421. This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true. At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries. The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe. The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them. The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization. The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance. The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries. They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out. More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor. We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on. Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it. Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot. It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus. It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe. Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing. Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier. Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan. The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested. They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism. They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts. In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley. In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911. Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records. This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system. China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire. With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force. The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China. Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China. On the eastern edge was the ocean. On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina. On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India. To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes. There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand. Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors. China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history. Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy. This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands. European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider. It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China. Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society. As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things. In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan. In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward. Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s. That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors. Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability. From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things. First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo. We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean. Those voyages are all the records we have. Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however. China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s. They were looking west, south, and north. The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself. Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean. Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan. The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols. The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes. These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out. Further, we must consider the aftermath. Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch. His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia. But the strain was too great. His successors adopted a drastic alternative. The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned. Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden. And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question. It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off. I will be working on two separate sets of posts. The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more. The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why? Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history. It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete. Let’s see if this is any different…

01/22/2013

History is a complicated subject. There’s really no way to get around that fact. The problem, though, is that most people think that history is really, really simple. Everyone took history in school, after all. The history they took was just a collection of names and dates and places and all anyone had to do was remember who did what on which day. Simple, right?

Names and dates and places and important battles are easy to remember and put into a multiple choice test. Knowing names and dates and places, however, isn’t what history is about. The point of the study of history is to figure out why a particular person was in a particular place to fight a particular battle or make a certain discovery or whatever. That particular bit of understanding tends to be rather involved and it’s why there are a lot of people out there who can write books extending to several hundred pages about things most people can’t be arsed to read even an article abstract on.

We know a great deal about history, though, because of all of those historians who spend their days writing about crap that most people don’t care to know or understand. The simple truth is, in fact, that although we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about history, there’s very little out there that can completely re-write the history books. This is why when some kook comes out with a new book about how so-and-so did such-and-such and there’s been a gigantic cover-up real historians shrug and then go on with their business. It’s self-evident to actual historians that such a thing isn’t possible, so they tend to ignore it.

It is, in fact, trivially easy to disprove the kooks in most cases. The problem is, though, that it requires an assertion of historical knowledge that most historians have or will readily accept but that isn’t exactly common knowledge amongst non-historians. It’s much easier, really, to say, “Yeah, that’s not how that worked,” than it is to actually explain why it is that it didn’t work that way. The difference in effort, too, explains part of the reason why trained historians don’t spend a lot of time debunking the kooky theory. They just go back to their real interest, which is incrementally changing the history books to incorporate new knowledge and remove outdated theories based on our understanding of the world before that knowledge came to light.

There is one way that historians end up rewriting history books, however. It’s not about pulling new information out of the ether. It’s not about making some mind blowing discovery that negates everything we thought we knew before. It’s about taking what we already knew and looking at it from a different perspective. Historians do that all the time.

One of the most magnificent examples of re-writing our understanding of history came out in 2008. English historian John Darwin published a massive tome called After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405. I actually picked up a copy of the book back in the summer or fall of 2008 because the book looked fascinating. His goal, as the subtitle suggests, was to break down the history of global empire for the previous six centuries. He did so in just over five hundred pages, which means that the book is both densely packed with information and argument and shallow in how deeply it deals with the background information behind any single idea or argument. In short, it’s the sort of book that only a historian can truly appreciate, since it requires a deep underlying understanding of many things.

I first read the book shortly after I bought it and I remembered appreciating it but not getting too much out of it beyond an appreciation for what Darwin’s arguments were. I pulled it out again well over a month ago and started re-reading it, this time much more slowly than in the past. The second time around I think I managed to appreciate just how truly magnificent and breathtaking the book is in its breadth and scope.

Darwin’s argument, basically, is that traditional western interpretations of history are wrong in that they’re written with a certain air of inevitability and cultural superiority. This is truly important, since we’re sitting on the back end of the legacy of European colonialism and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that legacy. More importantly, though, we’re still dealing with the ingrained cultural notions that are the inevitable outcome of that colonial ideal. Europeans and Americans still function under the misapprehension that there’s something inherently superior in Caucasian culture and genetic makeup when compared to non-Caucasian culture and genetics.

Darwin’s work also butts up against the most common non-Western notions of history. Since Westerners had an understandable tendency to attempt to erase the history and culture of their colonial possessions and replace it with their own, supposedly superior, culture and history, we do have pretty wide gaps in the historical records of the people colonized by Westerners. Those gaps have been subsequently filled in by partisans who have tried to play up their culture and downplay or outright villainize the involvement of Europeans. Interestingly enough, though, in many cases these histories either implicitly accept Western framing of the notion of history or attempt to completely obliterate Western history in an attempt to de-legitimatize Western historians. Both approaches are highly flawed and lead to conclusions that are far from accurate.

This time around I was most fascinated by Darwin’s treatment of world history from 1880 or so through the early days of the Cold War. I realized while rereading the book that we seem to be basically replaying large parts of world history in the years leading up the World War I.[1] His arguments brought the world of today into greater focus.

As such, consider this the introduction of a series on John Darwin’s magnificent work and what it means to genuinely overturn standard notions of history. Before I get to the 1800s, however, I feel it’s a good idea to make a baseline comparison between Darwin and someone else who thought he’d overturn all of history as we know it. That’s right, we’re going to go look at Gavin Menzies.

Hooray!

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[1]Up to a certain point. The geopolitical realities of the world in 2012 are far, far different from those of 1912. The United States has no military or economic peer and there is no uneasy détente between equally balanced European powers who have their claws dug into colonies all over the world. I do not, in short, expect that we’ll end up plunging into World War III at any point in the near future. That said, it’s fascinating to see how people talk about the world today and compare it to how they talked about the world a century in the past.

01/17/2013

I suppose it’s possible that most MRAs on the internet are all just extremely skilled and subtle satirists attempting to offer a display of exactly what it looks like when an overly testosteroned bully crawls so far up his own ass that he can no longer breathe through all the shit. Somehow, though, I doubt that’s the case. I doubt that’s the case, specifically, because every time I run into an MRA he’s so very serious and mean-spirited that I can’t believe he has enough human empathy to actually engage in satire. So either every MRA is dead serious, every MRA is a pitch perfect satirist, or all MRAs are one or the other. I’m forced to assume that it’s the first option, mostly because satirizing that sort of bullshit would be exhausting.

I bring this up because of Fred Clark over at Slacktivist. See, a couple of years ago he got married to a woman who already had kids from a previous marriage. From time to time he writes about his adopted daughters and gives off the impression that 1.) he’s adjusted to fatherhood quite well, thankyouverymuch and that 2.) he’s rather proud of his adopted daughters and pretty much treats them as if they were his own. He is, in short, a mensch in this just as much as he is in pretty much everything else he does.

I think that Fred’s example here is important. A couple of months ago I tossed in a bit about my realization that at 31 I was seriously limiting my dating options with my blanket ban on single mothers. This is a phenomenon that we as a society will have to deal with more and more, as there are a lot of people out there who have kids and are also not in committed, long-term relationships with their co-parent.

This isn’t a problem from a moral standpoint. This is, however, a problem from a logistical and emotional standpoint. Getting into a relationship is, by itself, fraught with complications. Getting into a relationship with someone who has kids through another person is far, far more complicated.

I actually tossed a question about the whole thing into a post a couple months ago. It was a thought experiment because I’ve run up against the problem a couple of times and I’d thought about it but hadn’t actually put myself into a position to deal with it. So I solicited advice. I got a comment from Mike Timonin that was definite food for thought:

The thing you need to keep in mind in regard to kids in a family is that families are exponential, not additive. So, if you meet someone and form a relationship (any relationship, but let's assume romantic for the moment), that 2 - your relationship with hir and hir relationship with you. Add a kid (or any other person - poly relationships are complicated in the same way) and you're not just adding one new relationship, but 3 - the kid's relationship with their parent, the kid's relationship with you, and the kid's relationship with your relationship with hir parent. So, it's complicated. You need to consider how you feel about the mom, and about the kid, and about how your relationship with the mom will affect the parent-child relationship and so on.

It was really thoughtful and I meant to respond to it at the time, but, um, I didn’t. Mostly because I’m easily distracted by – hey! Look! A squirrel!

I actually think that Mike understated the problem. If you get into a relationship with someone who has a kid you have to manage your relationship with that person. You have to manage your relationship with that kid. You have to be aware of how they relate to each other. You also have to be aware of the fact that you now have a relationship with the biological parent with whom you are not in a relationship. You also now have two sets of biological grandparents and you have to deal with the fact that you’ve now made your own family into a collection of in-laws and grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles. It’s all crazy go nuts, basically.

You also don’t get an easy mode. I’ve spent most of the last decade in easy mode and, I’ve got to tell you, it’s been pretty easy. If I want to sit around and drink beer and watch TV and not give a shit about anything I can. If I want to go on a couple dates with someone somewhere I can. Since I’ve mostly been dealing with women who are also childless I’ve been able to make and break last-minute plans without too much difficulty.

Bring someone with a kid into that and it’s totally different. At least, I’d assume it’s different. I mean, I have a dog. I can’t go anywhere without putting some amount of thought into the question of, “What will I do with Daisy?” If I’m going to the store I just let her run around and play with her toys. If I’m going to be gone for a few hours I have to crate her. If I’m going to be gone longer I have to make arrangements to take her somewhere. You can’t leave a child alone for any length of time (or, at least, you can’t do it without risking a visit from your friendly neighborhood DCFS case worker). So something as simple as a coffee date ends up being a major investment (at least, I assume).

If I were to date someone with a kid I’d have to be aware of that and sensitive to it. If it were to get more serious than a couple dates and then an, “I don’t think we’re really compatible,” I’d then have to be willing and able to incorporate this woman and also her offspring and also all of the baggage that comes with this woman and her offspring into my life. That might be a major sacrifice on my part, too. Am I dealing with someone who has an actively involved father who pays alimony or am I suddenly taking on the burden of paying for all the kid’s needs when I’m accustomed to blowing my extra money on craft beer and chicken schwarma at Naf Naf? Am I going to have to start putting my pita money towards a college fund?

Am I, in short, prepared to be both a boyfriend/husband and father when last week I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to be a boyfriend?

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I bring all of this stuff up because I saw one of the most absolutely dickish things ever at Fred’s place last week. He’s been doing this ongoing series called “Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day” in which he copies passages of the Bible about families that look nothing like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. The whole thing is a satire on the concept of “Biblical families” pushed by Evangelical Christians as an attempt to fight against things they don’t like by saying, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

Are we really supposed to take family advice from an unemployed mangina raising a fitter man's seed? I bet you even think your wife's not cheating on you.

Everything about that comment set off every single one of the various, “Oh, holy hell, what kind of an asshole are you?” alarms in my head. Several commenters called him out for it, but a couple asked if he was responding to Fred’s post or Fred himself. At that point Eric the Red proved that, yes, he’s a complete and total shitheel:

Of course I was talking about Fred. Truly did Heartiste speak correctly of his kind (and the other snivelling manboobs here) when he said:

Your typical outrage feminist and limp-wristed manboob flirts dangerously close to the monster threshold. Humans recoil from manjawed, mustachioed, beady-eyed, actively aggressive women and chipmunk-cheeked, bitch tittied, curvaceously plush, passive-aggressive men as if they were the human equivalent of dog shit. The farther your feminist or manboob deviates from the normal human template, in physical and psychological form, the more monstrous it becomes to the average person.

Now imagine you stomp through life as one of these howling feminists or putrid nancyboys, like Grendel disturbed by the sights and sounds of normalcy all around him. You sense, in your darkest secret thoughts, that most people are repulsed by you, want to have nothing to do with you, would be embarrassed to be seen with you. How do you think that would affect your mental state? First, you would seek out others like you. Monstrosity loves company. Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.

So…first of all…all of the italicized word salad is something Eric the Red was quoting from somewhere else. I’m not going to include the link, since, well, fuck that misogynistic asshole, that’s why. But, seriously, this guy is a total and unrepentant shitheel. And the guy he quoted with much admiration has all of the writing ability of a brain-damaged orangutan who has been handed a smartphone with a particularly glitchy autocorrect.

That said, there’s a certain horrible beauty to the awkwardly strung together words above. It’s almost a form of beat poetry, really. I imagine John Lithgow would do amazing work with “Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.” It’s not exactly a Newt Gingrich press release, but it’s still potentially pretty in its self-important incoherence.

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I think it’s important to talk about things like this. Divorce is a reality in our world. Extra-marital sex resulting in pregnancy is a reality in our world. Single parents are a reality in our world.

Those single parents, whether they had sex outside of marriage, got divorced, or had to bury their biological co-parent, meanwhile, shouldn’t be expected to suddenly stop looking to love and be loved. To expect that is folly. To mock someone who then decides to love a single parent and invite that person and that person’s kid(s) and all of the complications of biological parents and grandparents and all of that into their life a lesser being is the height of unabashed assholery. It’s also an admission on the part of the mocker that they don’t have anything close to the level of character of the person they’re mocking.

Of course using the word “mangina” in all seriousness is also the height of unabashed assholery. But that’s a story for another day.

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It’s one of those things that goes back to my discussions of bullying and my theory that people end up choosing between empathy and resentment and that choice guides how they react to others. The example offered by Eric the Red above is obviously one of someone who has chosen resentment. It’s weird, too, since he obviously reads Fred’s stuff enough to know that Fred is currently unemployed and the husband of a woman who has children from a previous relationship. That means that he’s been sitting there, seething in his resentment about Fred for a while. That’s pretty sad, really.

There’s another level where it fascinates me. When I ask whether I could date a woman who already has a kid the question basically boils down to this: am I a good enough person to deal with this? Could I drop my basic self-absorption and accept a whole constellation of complications into my life without switching from empathy and love to resentment and hatred?

It seems to me that mocking someone who has made that choice and calling him a lesser being for doing so is a pretty good way to advertise that you’re a pretty massive jackhole.

01/16/2013

One of the things that occurred to me at some point during my random diatribe against triggers is that the people who run around talking about trigger warnings and how everything needs to have one don’t really seem to understand how the human mind works. A trigger, at its most basic, is simply something that causes a strong emotional response. The language center of the brain, meanwhile, isn’t the most closely connected bit to the emotional center.

I’m not saying that people don’t have emotional responses to words. I’m saying that setting out to police words to keep emotional responses from happening is probably a fool’s errand. That’s not just how the brain works. Emotional reactions are far more closely connected to nonverbal cues.

The first one didn’t happen because of the words used. It started because the tone of voice used offered a cue that this was being said specifically to be overheard by others. Even that was okay until someone else laughed. The short, sharp laugh set off a cascade of memories and emotions that basically said, “Oh, my, god, I can’t believe this is happening again.”

The second one was actually even more interesting on some level. The thing that got me was the way he leaned in real close and called me an asshole in a quiet voice that no one else could overhear. It was a low-level threat delivered in a way that felt isolating. I mean, you could yell, “Hey, you’re a total asshole!” at me from across the room and I’d probably say, “I know, right?” So there was absolutely nothing in the message he delivered that bugged me. The way it was delivered, though, left me feeling alone and vulnerable.

Also, it occurred to me after I wrote the first post that I don’t really see trigger warnings or overly serious discussions of triggering and trigger warnings anymore. I think part of it might be that I don’t frequent the same places anymore. I also think it’s possible that we’ve kind of stopped talking about it obsessively. That latter option would be nice.

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There’s another thing that annoys me that I still see on a regular basis. One of the phrases that gets tossed around on the internet a lot is, “intent is not magic.” For those who haven’t run into that, it’s basically a pithy way of saying, “You said something wrong and hurtful and it doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to and/or you didn’t even know that it was wrong and hurtful. So fuck you, troll.”

It’s somewhat more complicated than that, actually. Mostly it comes up in a situation where Person A says something hurtful to Person B and Person B says, “Hey, that hurt.” Any response from Person A that doesn’t start with, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’ll never say that again,” tends to start with, “I didn’t intend to cause any harm in saying that.” This, then, results in, “Intent is not magic, asshole!”

The primary issue I have with anything that starts with “intent is not magic” is that it often starts with a presumption of bad faith. Please allow me to offer a real life example:

I used to spend a rather large amount of time with a sign language interpreter. I was talking to her once about something or other involving people who totally didn’t get something or other and I said to her, “People like that are culturally deaf.”

She got visibly pissed at me and said, “What did you just say?” I repeated my statement. She then asked me where I got off making fun of deaf people and saying they didn’t have or couldn’t connect to culture (I don’t remember what the specific response was).

I was utterly baffled. To me the word “deaf” had multiple definitions and connotations. In calling the people we were both in agreement about “culturally deaf” I was simply saying that they lacked the ability to understand and absorb whatever it was that culture referred to in that context. It was, in short, a metaphor. It also had absolutely nothing to do with any actual deaf people and it certainly wasn’t an attempt to mock their ability to interact with or contribute to the larger culture.

I, being an idiot, attempted to explain all of these nuances. That just pissed her off more. It finally ended with her telling me to never use that term again and me agreeing because it just wasn’t worth it to have that argument anymore. In short, she informed me that intent wasn’t magic and that she wasn’t going to listen to what my intent was, nor was she going to entertain any interpretation of my statements outside of her own.

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This is bad enough when dealing with someone you know and who, theoretically, knows you enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. On the internet nobody gives the benefit of the doubt. Anything that seems even remotely like the worst possible thing that could have been said receives that interpretation. Any follow up response that’s anything other than, “You’re right, I’m worse than Hitler and Caligula combined,” is then taken as an indication that the person making the original statement is, in fact, worse than Hitler and Caligula combined.

It’s even worse when the second person completely and totally misinterprets the original statement. It seems like one of the rules of the internet is, “Never admit you’re wrong. Double down.” Since this rule applies to both sides of the argument…well…you can see where it’s going.

01/15/2013

There’s a follow-on thought to my last post that I simply didn’t have time to explore properly. I figured four thousand words was more than enough for everyone for one day and the only way to get into the issue while still pretending to care about economy of words would be to say something extremely flip that would make me look like an ass. I try to avoid looking like an ass, especially in situations where I’m not even trying to be an ass but have a pretty strongly held opinion. So let’s to it, then.

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I started the Being Me posts on a story that the kids on the internetz would refer to as “triggering.” I would, in fact, say that it was triggering. I pretty much admitted to being triggered in the very next post when I pointed out that it was still bugging the hell out of me twenty-four hours later.

I also ended the Being Me posts on a story that was triggering. The outcome of that story was very different, however. It is in the space between these two stories that I want to discuss why I think the whole trigger warning thing on the internet is good but can also get completely and totally out of hand.

Mostly I’m going to tell stories.

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Triggers are simply a way to register mental pain. They mean that something has happened and that thing needs to be dealt with. There’s really no other, additional magic in the whole thing.

Let’s say your friend breaks his leg. You go and see him a week after the leg breaking incident and he’s sitting on his bed with his obviously broken and unset leg propped up in front of him. You’re concerned and confused.

You say, “Hey, haven’t you gone to the doctor to fix that broken leg?”

He responds with, “Hey, man, don’t talk about the leg. You’re reminding me about the pain.”

You’re taken aback, but you try again. “The pain will go away if you get it fixed, you know,” you tell him. “And unset broken bones can cause all kinds of other problems, like gangrene. If you leave it long enough they’ll probably have to amputate and that’ll be even worse.”

“Hey!” he says, “What did I tell you about talking to me about broken legs? Don’t you know that it hurts me to have to talk about this broken leg?”

At this point your buddy is cutting off discussion. Specifically, he’s cutting off a discussion that he really needs to be having. There might be some sort of valid, underlying reason why he’s not going to the doctor. Maybe he doesn’t have insurance. Maybe he had a pediatrician who was a real dick. Maybe he broke his leg in high school and some kid drew a penis on the cast and everyone made fun of him for it. All of these things might be a valid reason to have trepidation about a visit to the doctor’s office. None of these things are a valid reason to not get his broken leg fixed. Further, there’s absolutely no reason to allow that underlying shit to keep the thing that needs to get done from getting done because it will be so, so much worse later.

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This is the root of my discomfort with the whole trigger warning thing. For the most part I think the triggering events are a sign that something or other is going on that needs to be fixed, so running around and saying, “Hey, you can’t talk about this!” or, “Hey, warn me before you bring this up!” is really just a way of publically not fixing a problem and making it someone else’s fault that you’re not doing so. It’s also a really good way to wallow in misery and try to drag other people into your misery, too.

I was in my first car accident my junior year in high school. I worked at a shop at the time and that was the shop that I had my car towed to. When I got there everything was pretty busy, so my boss said to me, “Hey, since you’re not doing anything can you take that car over there and [whatever, test drive, part pickup, I don’t remember]?” I got into the car and for a moment had this, “Oh my god, I can’t do this,” response. But I did whatever needed to get done and spent the entire time worried that I might get in another accident because I’d just gotten in one. I doubt I’ve been more careful and alert while behind the wheel of a car since that afternoon.

Nothing happened. Well, nothing bad happened and certainly nothing memorable beyond the thing itself. So I got on with my life and I’ve been driving ever since. I even drove tow trucks for a while and often found myself at the scene of an accident that was much, much worse than the one I’d been through. I never even thought of my own accident during those calls.

This is, admittedly, a pretty minor thing. But what if I hadn’t gotten into that car that afternoon? What if, instead, I’d had a panic attack and then refused to drive for the rest of the year? What if I’d used that to fuel a massive fear of driving cars and even now, a decade and a half later, I was still completely and totally sans automobile?

It might make perfect sense to me. To an outside observer, however, I’m just some dude totally overreacting to a minor fender bender from a really long time in the past.

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This isn’t to say that there aren’t major traumatic life events that have far-reaching consequences. I think it’s important to be sensitive to that and not increase anybody’s pain unnecessarily. As such, if I know I’m going to be talking about something that can be a pretty big deal I’m now in the habit of trying to make sure I point that out. I think, though, that the entire trigger warning thing, at least in the places I tend to frequent, tends to tilt in the direction of over the top unintentional self-parody.

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When I was in college I had a friend who had a really long last name. I was hanging around with her one day right after I’d been listening to the Singles soundtrack and, specifically, Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart.”[1] There’s a line in the song that goes “Is that your name or a doctor’s eye chart?” One thing led to another and I nicknamed my long-named friend “Eye Chart.’

A couple months (weeks? I don’t know) later I was hanging out with some other people and Eye Chart wasn’t there. I made a reference to her and one of our mutual friends ripped into me. She informed me in no uncertain terms that Eye Chart hated that nickname and I needed to stop using it because I was being a total ass.

This surprised me, as I hadn’t gotten the impression this was the case. So the next time I saw Eye Chart I said, “Hey, I just found out that you don’t like it when I call you Eye Chart. I didn’t know. I’ll stop.”

Her response was a blank stare and a, “Who told you that?” I told her and she said, “I never told her that and I don’t know where she’s getting it from. I don’t have a problem with you calling me Eye Chart.”

I later figured out that the person who jumped all over me had a whole lot of issues and apparently a lot of them were specifically with me for reasons I couldn’t really understand. Actually, I kind of knew it at the time, but it didn’t sink in until later. She accused me of shit I didn’t do on several occasions and eventually precipitated one of the worst evenings of my life. I started trying to avoid her within about six months of meeting her.

I offer this as a cautionary tale. It’s a good idea to listen to people and take them seriously. It’s also a good idea to be aware of the fact that some people have agendas or a skewed view of reality or might just fucking hate you for no discernible reason. C’est la vie.

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I tend to think of that story whenever I see the, shall we say, sillier trigger warning arguments. Somebody on a blog says something. Someone else pops in and says, “You shouldn’t say that, or if you do you should really put a trigger warning on it because it might bug someone.” The whole thing then devolves into a bizarre argument about triggers wherein absolutely none of the people involved have actually been triggered by the theoretically triggering passage and no one can present anything other than anecdotal evidence about a former acquaintance who had to deal with something that was kinda-sorta similar.

It’s basically a derailing or a heckler’s veto. And I think it goes back to my general theory of the shortcomings of Web 2.0 and the fact that people read things that have comments and all they can think about is what they will say at the end. The trigger warning warner, then, is just someone who wants to make the conversation about them and only them and make sure that they educate everyone else about how awesome and inclusive they are and how much of a rotten jerk the person who wrote the original post is.[2]

This is also where it’s hard to talk about much of anything as a straight, white male without knowing someone, somewhere, might stumble upon this post and say, “You just don’t get it, you privileged, mansplaining jackass!”[3] In and of itself that’s an internalized derailing or heckler’s veto, I suppose. That’s part of the reason that I’ve had thoughts on this subject for a while but I never managed to bring myself to write them down.

On one level that doesn’t matter. I’m not going to change the world for better or worse with this post, mostly because nobody’s gonna fucking read it.

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[1]I’m listening to it right now. It’s kind of a terrible song. Apparently Paul Westerberg was the early ‘90s secular Rick Cua.

Don’t watch that. It’ll fuck your earholes up.

[2]This is not to say that everyone who pops into the comments and says, “Really? I can’t believe you just said that,” is wrong or just trying to get attention. As an example, Ed Brayton recently wrote a column about Chuck Norris’s reality-free fantasies about going underground to start some secret project to save the country from the godless libruls with a joke about Norris infiltrating a cocktail party in heels and a dress. Someone in the comments asked why he’d make such an insensitive joke.

I had pretty much passed it over, but the comment got me to stop and think and I realized that, yeah, that joke was pretty insensitive. It plays off an old trope of men dressing as women in movies and TV shows and whatnot to infiltrate things. That trope, though, plays off of the, “Ha, ha! Look at that big, manly man in a dress! Isn’t that so hilariously funny?” The reason it’s funny, though, is because men aren’t supposed to dress like that and anyone who does dress like that is to be mocked. On one level that’s an insult to cross-dressers and transfolk based on strictly enforced gender norms. On another level it serves to reinforce gender norms and conformity. So for someone who claims to not like that sort of thing to make the joke indicates that either they’re not actually as open-minded as they thought or that they have a blind spot that ought to be examined.

Further, in the first paragraph of this footnote I used the phrase “or just trying to get attention.” The more common vernacular for that is, “or is an attention whore.” I’ve waded through a metric shit-ton of posts and comments arguing on the appropriateness of the term “attention whore.” Mostly it boils down to an argument of “it’s a gendered insult directed primarily at women” against “it’s such a common phrase in English that it’s been stripped of all connotation about how whore is usually synonymous with women. It’s like sinister.”

On the one hand, I tend to side with the folks who say it’s been stripped of most of the connotations from a gender perspective. That’s the side I tend to come down on for certain other debates, too. “Hysterical” comes to mind, but I know there are a few others floating around out there. On the other hand, I’ve pretty much stopped using the phrase “attention whore” and I don’t really use “hysteric” in any of its myriad forms anymore. On a purely functional level it’s just easier. On a deeper level, though, I recognize that terms like that do actually hearken back to a time when those words very specifically referred to women and were used to marginalize them. So I’m forced to ask myself whether my belief that men and women should be treated equally is more important to me than my continued ability to make unfettered use of words or phrases with a specific bias against the female gender? The answer to that is pretty simple. It’s no, by the way.

My turning point on this, by the by, was the use of “gay” as a pejorative. My use of that term as an insult was vanishingly small to begin with, but hearing other people use it never really bugged me. Then one day it occurred to me that I knew a bunch of gay people and I liked them or, at least, had fond memories of them even though I hadn’t talked to them in a long time. It also occurred to me that I thought that gay people, my gay friends included, should be treated the exact same way as I am treated.

I imagine that I would feel pretty bad if some dingus on the internet replied to a bad beat in the multi-player mode of First Person Shooter Oh-Thirteen with, “Aw, man, that’s totally Geds.” I also imagine that I’d feel bad if they did so with something that I consider an integral part of my personality, like, “That’s totally writer, man!” or, “What kind of person-who-finds-Louise-Post-insanely-attractive-in-the-‘Volcano-Girls’-video cheating motherfucker are you?” So why the hell would I condone someone using the word gay in that fashion?

And, yes, I just tossed that bit about the “Volcano Girls” video in the last one as an excuse to link to the “Volcano Girls” video. But that’s just because I want to retroactively declare that the song of the year for the last fifteen years. And that’s a really hilariously super specific insult. I also chose it mostly because I couldn’t take myself seriously turning, “That’s so heterosexual,” into an inverse of, “That’s so gay.”

This whole thing is insanely selective and pretty arbitrary, though. Like, I’m totally okay with calling someone a giant bag of dicks. A few years ago I randomly coined the word “dickshitter” to yell at people who were being total idiots while driving. I intend to continue yelling, “Dickshitter!” at idiots in BMWs. If someone were to show up and call me a dickhead I’d be fine with that. Okay, I might not be fine with it, but I’d take no issue with the choice to use “dickhead.” And why is that? Fuck if I know. I’m guessing it’s a privilege thing, but operating in reverse. Basically, I’m a middle class white dude, which means that I’m going through life on easy mode so I can afford to not worry about insults that also serve as reminders that I’m operating on easy mode. It’s kind of like a double-standard, I guess. Maybe.